#// this got very long i'm sorry ergnerjgk

[paragonrising]

@jbbarnes liked this for a starter.

Why was it always Earth that weird shit happened to?

Carol floated some distance away from New York City, staring at a… well, it looked alarmingly close to a blackhole. It’d consumed most of the city, and had a drifting debris field circling it. The sliver of comfort she clung to, was that it couldn’t possibly be an actual blackhole. If it was, then Earth would have been destroyed by the time she’d arrived.

That being said, she didn’t know what it was. Maybe a wormhole, but who the hell had opened it and why had it ate New York?

When she dove down to the teams monitoring it – she wasn’t surprised to see different teams clamouring to try and figure out what was going on. S.W.O.R.D was present, as was S.A.B.R.E, NASA… every acronym organisation Carol could think of was here. 

She instinctively headed for S.A.B.R.E.

“There’s a signal coming from it,” a researcher explained, trying his best not to fidget with his tie, glancing at Carol. “We can’t decipher what it says, whatever’s being sent comes out this end completely garbled.”

“Can you at least tell if it’s alien?” She asked.

“No,” he shook his head, “human, alien, AI… whatever it is, it’s too corrupted by the time we receive it for us to properly get anything.” He snapped a finger as if he recalled something, “it sounds like it’s following a pattern though.”

She frowned.

“So, what’s the plan?”

The plan was terrible, not that Carol got a say in it. She was supposed to fly close to the event horizon and hope that her suit’s gear could relay a clearer signal back to S.A.B.R.E command. If not that, then at least pick up something more helpful herself, and return with it. The general consensus was that her powers should protect her from whatever terrible effect the portal could unleash.

Key word: should. That didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Because there were a few things in the universe Carol decidedly did not mess with. Blackholes were one of them, in fact they were at the top of the damn list. And this thing, while not exactly functioning like a true blackhole, certainly looked the part.

She flew closer, fighting against the sinking feeling in her gut. She passed by pieces of a broken skyscraper, gliding through the debris as if it were an asteroid belt.

Her first hint that something was about to go wrong, was seeing wisps of her energy begin to trail towards the darkness.

“Huh,” Carol frowned, holding up her hand, watching the traces fly towards the blackhole. “That’s not good.”

Her second hint was the stomach-churning sensation of two sources of gravity fighting over her.

The third hint–well, it wasn’t so much as a hint as the realisation that she’d been being pulled closer this entire time, only now had it become obvious. The black horizon she was being dragged to was getting alarmingly large, with nothing inside of it and no light escaping it. Carol tried to fly away and escape, but she couldn’t—and now she was noticing she was getting pulled in faster.

“Oh, shit—”

Carol gasped, eyes snapping open to stare at a sky that was a bright void of white. Her body was sore, and she couldn’t quite remember what happened after she tried to escape the wormhole’s pull. She sat up, finding that she’d landed on a floating piece of sidewalk.

“What the hell…” she murmured, looking around.

The world around her was a whitescape save for chunks of what could only be the remnants of New York City. Pieces of all sizes floating, bouncing off one another and then drifting apart. 

Carol stood, frowning as her ears buzzed from the stark silence of this place. She was thankful when it faded, but what she heard in place of it made her hesitate.

Music.

With no real idea where she should go, she followed the sound, jumping from her little island of concrete to one that looked like a section of an apartment complex. She slipped through a window and landed in an obliterated living room, the couch was sort of just spinning in the air, while a record player floated near to what remained of a wall.

That’s when she saw another person. Someone who looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him. He was taller than she was, dark hair, looked a little tired. 

“Hi,” she greeted, “did you... put the music on?”